Thursday, August 20, 2009

This is one of those rare cartoons that is wrought from my own experience. When my eldest daughter was a kid, she was vacillating between wanting to be a writer and a musician, and wondered how she would ever be any good at either if her childhood continued to be happy.

A few years later, her mother and I solved that problem by getting divorced. There is nothing I wouldn't do for my children.

Speaking of screwed-up children, how are beauty pageants for children still legal? These things are clearly factories for mental illness and pedophilia. I can't help thinking that one day Americans will look back at pictures of these freak shows with the same disbelief and revulsion that most of us now do when we see an old photo of a public lynching.

How refreshing to find out I'm not the only one totally creeped out by these "pageants"! Barbie's head on Betsy Wetsy's body is just too much. Are these the unfortunate children of mothers who didn't have dolls when they themselves were young?

It's a form of child abuse, IMO, to subject kids, some as young as 5 and 6, to the rigors of a beauty pageant. They are, indeed, creepy as hell. Particularly disgusting are the mothers who say the kid wants to do it, and then asks their little 7-year-old 'princess' if she likes appearing in beauty pageants -- it's like watching a gulag prisoner dumbly affirm they are being treated well while the guards stand near.

Another vile barnicle on the dark underbelly of this nation. Speaking of which, I wonder: Was Sarah Palin in beauty pageants as a child?

Those beauty pageants are beyond creepy. They epitomize a lot of what is wrong in America. You have the right to royally screw up your kid because we feel that kids are basically chattel to be treated any way their parents choose (because the bible says so!). Then the kid grows up to be Anna Nicole Smith or Michael Jackson.

Have you noticed that a lot of the mothers of these poor unfortunate children are either overweight, ugly or both? I think they are working through some of their own issues.

Man, those child beauty pageant photos are freaky! By the way, I had a similar experience to your daughter's when I was growing up -- I wanted to be a writer, but I realized all (ok, most) writers are tortured souls and not real happy, so I decided to be an architect instead. (Now I am a tortured soul with good taste.)

I continue to be horrified by children in beauty pageants. And even more horrified by the show "Tots in Tiaras." These poor children not only are dressed and made up like mini-prostitutes, but their insane mothers are using them to live their lives for them.

I worked years ago in a fabric store. One day a woman came in and was buying lame' and lace and satin and asking her daughter's opinion on all of them. The daughter, who looked to be about seven, clearly could not have cared less. I asked what all this formal fabric was for, and Mommy Dearest launched into a photo essay about the little girl's pageant career. The photos were just as disturbing as the ones you have posted here. This was several years before the JonBenet Ramsey situation (and I live in the Denver/Boulder area) so it was extra freaky when that happened...I obviously thought a lot about that little girl from the fabric store when the JonBenet story broke.

The little girl in the fabric store looked like a rather tom-boyish, normal little kid. Seeing her fixed up like a prostitute in those photos, and knowing that her mother went WAY out of her way to MAKE her look like that freaked me out for quite some time. I still think about her. I hope she found a way to shake of her mother's control and somehow found a way to have a normal life.

@ Penny: The saving grace may be teenage rebellion. I know of a woman whose mother was 'beauty pageant crazy' having been a contestant herself when she was young. Her daughter suffered with her mother's mania until she was 14 and then put her foot down and said 'enough -- no more beauty pageants.'

Even though she's told her mother in no uncertain terms that she hated entering beauty pageants as a kid, daffy Mom still insists 'she just loved it.' Self-delusion is a hard thing to penetrate with reality, but daughter would never think of entering her own kids in a BP, so the chain of misery and exploitation has been broken.